Monday, May 23, 2016

interview with the US zine You Can't Hide Your Love Forever - issue 4 winter 1990 although judging by the contents it was actually done in 1989 - interviewer was Johnny Ray Houston or Dave Segal or both

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

In recent years there’s been a veritable boom for “outsider
electronics”: the reissue, or in some cases first-time release, of recordings
by ultra-obscure composers. Active during the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, these
forgotten pioneers of synthesizer and tape-based music were either attached only
loosely to music institutions or operated as lone-rangers with neither funding
nor much hope of finding an audience. U.S.
label Creel Pone built up a cult following
through its now 100-plus series of CD-Rs that immaculately reproduce in
miniature the cover art, labels and even insert material of the original
out-of-print LPs. In Britain, Paradigm
Discs unearthed marvels of musique
concrete and text-sound by neglected figures like Trevor Wishart and Lily
Greenham, while Trunk Records salvaged works by mavericks like Desmond Leslie,
Basil Kirchin, and Tristram Cary. Both
U.K. labels have archived the extracurricular activities of key members of the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop, most notably with Paradigm’s Oramics,
a double-CD survey of the oeuvre of Daphne Oram.

Oramics came out in 2007, four years after the composer’s
death. Subsequently a massive cache of unreleased Oram came into the custodianship
of Goldsmiths College. The first siftings
from this massive motherlode (over 400 tapes!) are now being released via a new
vintage-electronics imprint, Young Americans. The Oram Tapes: Volume One is
available as a deluxe vinyl set (four discs cut at 45 rpm for supreme sound
quality) and, soon, as a double-CD. Two-and-a-half-hours long and 46 tracks wide, this dense wodge of experimental sound is a motley lot to digest even for obsessive fans of this sort of thing like
myself. Disorientation is intensified further
by the dearth of background about the
pieces: few are dated, little is known
about the techniques employed to make particular tracks, and it’s not clear if
they are finished or early drafts, complete in themselves or components of
larger assemblages.

The most realized-seeming, self-sufficient and imposing works
here belong to a series (well, apparent
series) of relatively long tracks named after places or institutions: titles
like “Eton” and “Manchester 2”. “London
University” (1968), takes what appear to be eavesdropped snatches of
conversation and whisks them into a meringue of phonemes. “Oxford” seems not so much composed as
decomposed: forms sliding into formlessness, a
twilight half-life of mossy, sunken-roofed decreptitude. At the other extreme are super-short pieces
that sometimes come across like Oram has invented a new instrument (on “Wool”, a futuristic version of the dulcimer) but can’t
quite think what to do with it.

The most
endearing of the miniatures here are Oram’s pieces for commercials. “Anacin
Components” appears to be an audio proposal or first draft, with Oram first
explaining and then demonstrating a set of sounds designed to evoke toothache,
migraine and a snuffly, catarrh-thick cold.

Part of the romance of this breed of lost experimentalists relates to their
struggle to create in the face of financial precariousness. Most, like Oram, subsidised
their grand long-term projects with hackwork: jingles and sound effects for adverts
and industrial films, scores for horror
or exploitation movies , LPs of library
music or jaunty rhythm-patterns for children’s Movement & Dance classes. America has its own electronic outsider breed:
characters like Warner Jepson, Todd Dockstader and Raymond Scott, whose output also
alternated between arty (ballet score commissions) and functional (Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Babies LPs).

But
there’s something particularly
appealing about the British figures: just the idea of them operating in twitchy-curtained suburbia or out in the leafy countryside (Oram’s studio in Kent was originally an oast-house, a
building used for the drying of hops). Listening to music by Oram or the other
Radiophonic mainstays, you can’t help
forming mental images in black-and-white, like a movie made at Ealing or
Elstree.

The Oram Tapes
plays up this quintessential Englishness by including several tracks that
feature Oram’s posh and proper voice.
Introducing one piece with “these pure tones are based on the Balmer
Sequence of frequencies for Hydrogen as seen on the spectroscope”, she sounds
like a chemistry teacher in a St Trinians film.
Another new reissue in this field, F.C. Judd’s Electronics Without Tears, uses the same ploy to play up the charming
quaintness. Unlike the matronly Oram, Fred Judd speaks with the stilted,
respectable-aspiring enunciation of Fred Kite, the trade unionist played by
Peter Sellers in I’m All Right Jack (1959),
except that instead of talking about collective bargaining and the Soviet
Union’s glorious achievements , he’s discussing the technicalities of musique
concrete. The last track on Electronics Without Tears has the East
London family man signing off with a “cheery bye”.

In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, the community of enthusiasts for
electronic music in Britain was small. Oram
and Judd knew each other and corresponded about their pipe-dreams: her Oramics system of “drawn sound” for converting visual data
(graphs, information etched onto film) into audio, and Judd’s Chromasonics technology for converting sound into visuals. Both had similar introductions to the world
of electronic sound. Aged only 17, Oram joined the BBC as an engineer in 1943,
during a wartime period when women were able to infiltrate professions
traditionally regarded as masculine. Judd developed his interest in sound while
serving in the RAF Coastal Command as an engineer working with radar equipment.

Despite these similarities, Oram and Judd represented different English “types”. She
was a syncretist and seeker whose interests in the arcane possibilities of
sound (for healing and psychological integration) took off into a heady-verging-on-cranky
realm where science and philosophy merged with mysticism and the paranormal.
Judd was in the mold of the English hobbyist , the sort of pragmatic,
phlegmatic bloke that James May might recruit to his “Make Things and Get
Excited” campaign. In his Woodford home, Judd cobbled together all manner of
electro-sonic contraptions, including personal prototypes for the synthesizer
and the drum machine. He made and released
music sporadically through the Sixties: 3 EPs of electronic ditties via his own
record company Castle (later gathered together as the 1970 LP Electronic Age for the library label
Studio G), plus the score for the sci-fi TV puppet show Space Patrol. But more of
Judd’s energy was dedicated to propagating the techniques of electronic music
via articles in the magazine Amateur Tape
Recording, which he edited for four years, and no less than eleven books.

The title Electronics
Without Tears sounds like a guide and the album is appropriately book-ended
with “here’s how to do-it-yourself” voice-overs. The opener “China Bowl” is Judd demonstrating
all the things that can be done with a sound “produced by striking a china
bowl”, such as playing it backwards and slicing-and-splicing it into different
sound-shapes. Penultimate track “Musique
Concrete Is Fascinating…” displays a composition that Judd sourced entirely
from that single original ceramic chime: a shimmering, quivering palace of
gelatin strands. Overall, Judd’s work is more dinky-sounding and tuneful than
the forebodingly abstract Oram tracks. Pieces like “Tempo Tune” recall British
studio wizards like Joe “Telstar” Meek or suggest computer game music if
computer games had been invented in the age of the Lyons’s Wimpy Bar. But there’s eerie ‘n’ avant stuff too, like the
percussive trio of “Moving Pieces”, “Sprockets” and “Voltage Control 2”,
which sound like regiments of Perspex-limbed robots on the march and stunningly
anticipate 1990s minimal techno.

Most of Judd’s master tapes were lost after his death in
1992, which holds out the tantalizing if tragically unlikely possibility that
somewhere out there lurks a treasure trove on the scale of the Oram archive. This is what boggles the minds of obsessive
fans of early electronica: so much of this stuff was recorded in the decades
immediately following World War Two, and while the recent reissue boom has made
unmanageable amounts of it available again, it’s just a fraction of what was
made.

Some of the music on The Oram Tapes and Electronics Without Tears enchants because it’s so dated, so evocatively era-bound. Other pieces could
jostle convincingly alongside contemporary analogue synth action by artists
like Ekoplekz or Keith Fullerton Whitman.
The fragmented brevity — splinters of textures, spores of inspiration
that never fully germinate—actually makes it more appealing to post-techno listeners
accustomed to tracks that are about sound-design and repetition but don’t really
go anywhere in terms of structural development.
These shards of sound made for
lowly functional purposes are more congenial to ADD-generation ears than the lofty-minded
long-form works composed by the electro-acoustic maestros of Europe during the same period.

Despite their numerous attempts to find it, Judd and Oram never
received the investment support to enable them to realise fully their ambitions: the attention and acclaim has sadly been mostly
posthumous. The pathos that hangs over
these frustrated careers adds to their prophet-without-honour allure: as with
so much reissue archaeology, there’s a pleasure in the idea of rectifying
historical injustice. The backstory has
become an indispensable element of the listening experience for this kind of
music. Indeed so strong is the niche demand for “lost visionaries, rediscovered”
that recently there’s been a spate of imaginary ones.

Like Ursula Bogner, a
rough German equivalent to Oram: allegedly a pharmacist/ home-maker who built
her own studio, in reality an extended jape by the electronic musician Jan
Jelinek that resulted in superb records like the recent Sonne = Black Box. The
latter came complete with a learned-looking journal of articles about the
composer, illustrated with film stills, filing cards, and sundry Bogner
ephemera. Other hilarious and highly
listenable audio-fictions include 2010’s Electronic Music in the Classroom by D.D.
Denham, purportedly a compilationof music concrete made by schoolchildren in the
1970s, and last year’s Endless House, supposedly
synth music from a 1973 arts-lab that flourished briefly in Czechoslovakia.

It’s
gotten so you have be really careful now. When the folks at Public Information
told me their next project after Judd involved trippy “electronics for dance”
made by a German émigré to the UK who ran a 1960s dance commune and was a devoted
naturist, I smelled a rat. His name? Ernest Berk. They swear he’s for real.